This is trying to eat your cake and still have it though.
If you ask a staunch free market person whether we should have laws restricting private activity or freedom of association, they say no. If you want to have a private organization and only invite women or only invite men then have at it.
But if you're going to have a law against that, over their objection, then it should at least be enforced consistently against everyone.
Objecting to the lack of consistency is different than objecting to the original principle.
Can you help me understand it better? Are you saying that it is currently against the law for @jl to donate to Lambda School to sponsor 40 men to attend for free? I don't think that is your point, but I'm having trouble interpreting it any other way.
Maybe none of them apply in this case. But given the complexity and somewhat arbitrary nature of the requirements, that seems more like happenstance than some reasoned choice to have this specific type of thing excluded as opposed to the others, and we probably ought to be more consistent one way or the other.
For example, if MIT (a private university) wanted to have a program like this, should it be allowed in this case but not in their case just because their institution does some unrelated publicly funded research or whatever the restriction is?
But then you're also opening them up to being an entirely or almost-entirely gender segregated school if they want to be. So which one is it?
You're absolutely right that free market doesn't mean your choices are exempt from criticism. That isn't my point, nor where I applied 'Free Market'.
My point was: If you're going to argue against this donation, saying that it fuels the trend of reverse racism / sexism that makes the free market more distorted, I would argue that this donation is very much a part of the free market. Private donations to private organizations for private causes.